The day after a National
Conversation on Race hosted by the Aetna, I was in McDonald's having a
McSomething and a cup of McCoffee. It was mid-morning and pretty
quiet in there. I saw the manager, a black guy about 27, wiping tables.
Being a writer and all-around Seeker of Truth, I set out to do a little
informal polling.
"You have a minute?" I asked and pulled out a chair.
"Sure, what can I do for you?" he replied.
"Do you know anything about the National Conversation
on Race?"
"Nah," he shrugged, "Um, kinda busy today,
I gotta make some phone calls."
So ended my Personal Conversation on Race.
It may have lacked the grand auditorium, television cameras and nationally-known
panelists of the event I attended a day earlier -- but it accomplished
about as much. At neither did I hear any hallelujahs of enlightenment
borne of breaking free from previously-held perceptions.
At the Aetna, the panel participants spoke for the
inclusion of women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, Native-Americans
and the disabled. Only Joe Sixpack was without a champion.
As best as I can figure, the premise behind these Conversations is all
we have to do is get a grip on group gripes and Eureka! We'll all
understand where everyone else is coming from and we can solve our racial
issues.
Now, I've watched CNN's "Crossfire" as many
times as I could stand it and I've never seen any mutual understanding
come of presenting opposing views. There's a reason we call some
things divisive. Take abortion for example. There are only
two sides: pro and con. The activists on this issue debate each other
all the time and neither convinces the other it is infanticide or a private
matter between a woman and her doctor.
The conversants at the Aetna didn't even agree on
what the buzzwords meant. Senator Joe Lieberman said he was for affirmative
action but against the use of quotas. Ward Connerly, the black author
of California's Proposition 209, said he too was for affirmative action
but opposed racial preferences. Aetna CEO Dick Huber seemed to express
the belief that corporations who ignore diversity will miss opportunities
for profit and as soon as they recognize this, affirmative action will
take care of itself without any, well, affirmative action.
There is a forbidden term in the Conversations which
is both necessary and useless. It is essential because it allows
a person to express a mindset. It is superfluous because race relations
comes down to the way each individual relates to his neighbor or co-worker.
The term is "you people."
A wave of disquiet scissored through the auditorium
when this taboo was threatened. Abigail Thernstrom, a white woman,
said she thought "the biggest problem in the African-American community"
is the inferior quality of education in the inner city. Her distaff
counterpart Joyce Tucker, a black civil rights lawyer, said she gets "very
uncomfortable whenever a white person says 'the biggest problem in the
black community is...'" The African-Americans in the audience broke
into applause. So much for candid conversation.
All the king's horses and men couldn't put Humpty
Dumpty together again because they were eggheads too. The fatal
flaw in these National Conversations may be they are conducted by politicians
and representatives of special interests and think tanks who believe racism
results from and can be cured by policy. We would be better served
by getting the views of the folks who moved out of Hartford in search of
whiter pastures or machinists who can speak of what unites and divides
them along the line at Pratt & Whitney. You don't build a pyramid
from the top down.
Black people want to know why they are pulled over
by cops or followed by store security personnel for no apparent reason.
Latinos want to learn why blacks and whites persist in trying to force
the use of English on them. The white couple from the suburbs needs
to understand the high teen pregnancy and accompanying child abuse rates
among Puerto Ricans in Hartford or why they sell beepers at the check-cashing
outlets on Park Street and Albany Avenue.
On one level of thought, some white people think
racism went out with tail fins and poodle skirts. Yet in a poll which
asked whites if they would trade places with a black person -- for a million
dollars -- few said they would. Somewhere in the mindset of that
refusal is an outline which can bring definition to America's bigoted shadow.
The polemics of affirmative action might make for
an interesting debate, but the more severe racial tensions flow along the
riprap of our societal interplay and in the basements of our individual
psyches. Until we can address those sentiments without fear
of recrimination, the National Conversation on Race will remain a Rohrshach
Test for the ears in which participants hear what they want to hear.